Time - how it flows, echoes, slips, is the subject of Dawn Ng’s seminal first solo show in London, located in the living heritage church St. Cyprian’s, Marylebone. As the space’s gothic revival arches curve and meet, they equally cocoon the exhibition Into Air composed of twelve individual works by the leading Singaporean artist. An ambitious assemblage of photographs, paintings, lightboxes, video, and the oeuvres explore the time held by the artist in the ultimate ephemeral object that is ice. As posed by Philip Larkin in his 1953 poem ‘Days’ - “What are days for? Days are where we live.” - Dawn Ng encourages us to revel in the being.

Each work, meticulously created with patience, attention, focus, and pause, takes as a point of departure a material that in itself is very much living. Ice: something created by nature then humans, scarce in tropical places such as Dawn Ng’s Singapore, prevalent in some other places, a sign of planetary change. An active material, it is at once emotionally charged and vitally uncontrollable. Yet, Dawn Ng gracefully converses with it, infusing this complex yet simple matter with pigments so that layer upon layer, tone, and texture, ‘Time and time over’ is articulated. An ephemeral foundation for a monumental body of work.